乞丐

Pier Paolo Pasolini has been one of the greatest directors in the world. Through astonishing imaginations and a peculiar perspective, he creates a distinct cinema style that visually and morally shocks many spectators. Having a complicated, disputed background and social belief, Pasolini’s work includes a whole range of contradictorily political and aesthetic features that are against moral decency and conventional social values. In the process of delineating reality, his film exceeds reality itself. Therefore, Pasolini’s film is a true combination of contaminations and poetry.
In his essay The Cinema of Italy, Patrik Rumble comments on Pasolini’s work,“Pasolini’s work has always been haunted by an often-unexpressed moral repugnance- often attributable to distress about the director’s homosexuality as well his identification with the historically marginalized and politically under-represented lower classes.” (The Cinema of Italy, 103) Indeed, in Pasolini’s film, it is difficult to find any elegant young lady or educated gentlemen. There is neither dream-like landscapes nor luxurious palaces. Pasolini concentrates on the lives on the lowest rungs of the social ladder: thieves, prostitutes, pimps, gangs who are always considered as the contaminants of the society. This theme was embedded early in his first film Accattone(1961), and consecutively presented in his later works as well. In Accattone, Pasolini tells the story of a young man-Accattone who has recently abandoned his wife and his son in order to become a pimp. Without any job, Accattone totally depends on the income of Maddalena who is a prostitute. The black and white pictures virtually show the everyday life of these people who have always been treated with contempt. For example in the sequence of Maddalena’s work, Maddalena is wearing a white dress. It is a huge contrast not only between the entire color setting of this scene but also between what she expects for her life and what she does for a living in reality. Later on, the pimps drive her to an isolated farmland. After Maddalena finishes her “job” with one of the pimps, they turn on the bright headlights and start beating her. The headlights cruelly show their degrading and abusive treatments; also violently accentuate the unequal treatment of Maddalena even in the lower class.
However, such portrayals were not pleasant to the majority of the audience. Pasolini’s another movie: Mama Roma (1962), depicting the relations between a prostitute and her son, was considered as an affront to the morality of his time. His last masterpiece, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), was banned by many countries for years. On the other hand, Pasolini’s films are not merely about contaminants. We can always catch some original pure traits of human beings from his “degrading” characters. For example, before the beating scene in Accattone, the other pimps are lying down on the ground while Maddalena does her job. While waiting for her, they are watching the sky and singing a beautiful Italian song. This natural action alludes to their initial pursuit of happiness and beauty. In Ricotta, when Stracci ferociously devours his cheese, it is obvious to see his pure human desire through his melodramatic body gestures. Therefore, Just like Pasolini mentioned in his interview, “ I love the huge mingling of enormous amounts of people, races. The mixture of cruelty and innocence.“ Without adding any other elaborated techniques and extras, Pasolini’s pornographic and violent images truly represent the mixture of cruelty and innocence. Accordingly, his truculent and rebellious mixture completely subverts the mainstream ideology of the bourgeois. Therefore Pasolini’s literature and films have been accused thirty three times in counts due to the “harmful contents” in his work
As a great realism poet, Pasolini also intersperses the elements of poetry in his films: He establishes a unique Pasolinian style of self-expression- the cinema of poetry. Pasolini first provides a certain type of aesthetic intuition to demonstrate the reality. The famous Soviet Armenian director Sergei Parajanov comments on Pasolini, “He is like a god to me, a god of the aesthetic, master of style, one who created the pathology of an epoch.” Such sincere admiration is powerful enough to highlight Pasolini’s accomplishments in cinema aesthetics. His peculiar interpretations of beauty draw a completely different perspective from our original expectation. In the beginning of Accattone, we see a man holding flowers. The frontal close up magnifies his lower class features, which make this image perturbing: a distorted hatchet-face without teeth. This strong contrast between the flower and this ugly-looking man visually shocks the spectators because the audience cannot easily draw a parallel between these two figures from the standard aesthetic mode. Pasolini makes this combination not only to illustrate the beauty of the lowness but also to show and construct the reality. In A Film Maker's Life (1971), he suggests, “When I make a film I'm always in reality, among the trees and among the people; there's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there's in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality. “ In this sense, we can conclude that Pasolini’s film is the celebration of the beauty of reality. At the same time, it also reflects the poetic essentials of the reality itself.
Just like his poems, Pasolini uses dialects, which he considers as the language of poetry in his movies. More importantly, he enriches his films by combining western paintings and dialectal languages. Therefore we see the man lying on the ground with his arms crossing in Accattone; the settings of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorention’s paintings in La Ricotta; the “Gods” and “Goddess” dancing on the grass, talking in dialect, and even being entertained with a striptease at lunchtime; and Stracci who is tied up on the huge wood cross under the sun as the background of the movie. (La Ricotta) Pasolini utilizes the famous religious paintings and reconstructs them by changing individual figure with the lower class people. These imitations are profound. “Cinematic images work as mirrors that allow viewers to look beyond the immediately perceptible pictures, to go beyond the logos, opening themselves to subjective interpretations, while reflecting on the gaze as a subject and object of its reflection.” (Cinepoiesis: The visual poetics of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Franco Piavoli) Through this way, “the cinema of poetry” depicts the connections of the images and the reality. Pasolini employs the poetic expression to show his sympathy toward the petty-criminal underworld of the Roman borgate and to criticize the Roman bourgeois.
Pasolini is known as one of the most significant directors in the 20th century. However in my opinion, instead of being “the most significant director”, Pasolini is more like a wizard of cinema. He uses his “black magic” to create an illusion of reality. What makes the illusion distinct is that the illusion is so real that in some ways it replaces the reality itself. His films reflect a whole range of whom we’ve become as human beings. He illustrates that the ugly sides of us as well as the most beautiful sides of us. He is far beyond his time thus he has the courage to open Pandora’s box and to set all of the dark secrets under his bright spot light. In this way, he embraces both sides of life with all of his love and passion through the means of cinema. Therefore in the Pasolinian world, everything becomes beautiful and precious, just like an endless poem.












Works Cited:
1. Movie: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Accattone (1961). La Ricotta (1962). Mama Roma (1962). Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)
2. Movie: Carlo Hayman-Chaffey, Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Film Maker's Life (1971)
3. Book: Patrik Rumble. Accattone. The cinema of Italy, Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. New York & London: Wallflower Press. 2004
4. Essay: Pasolini on Pasolini-Interviews with Oswald Stack. Indiana University Press. Bloomington and London.
5. Essay: Silvia Carlorosi, "Cinepoiesis: The visual poetics of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Franco Piavoli" (January 1, 2006).
6.Essay: Gino Moliterno, Senses of Cinema-Pier Paolo Pasolini : http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/pasolini.html#film

狂暴的帕索里尼处女作，纯正的意大利新现实主义，但也可从中窥见帕索里尼后期作品的影子。

主角阿加东是一个生活在贫穷的小村庄，无所事事，好吃懒做成天和同样不务正业的混混们虚度生命的皮条客。他会逼迫与自己同住的妓女在脚受伤的情况下接客，但他也会让拥有四个孩子的单亲妈妈寄宿在自己家里。所以他并不是泯灭人性的恶人，他在肮脏堕落的底层生活中依然有残存的良知。他之所以成为皮条客，完全是他价值观所致。正如他所说：“我绝不会为别人工作，我只会为自己工作。”帕索里尼在影片中将战后落魄的村庄里虚无的底层年轻们的生活和状态描绘的真实而残酷。被阿加东利用的妓女在荒郊野外与嫖客发生关系后又被四个嫖客殴打侮辱，但阿加东对此似乎并不放在心上。（这也为之后妓女向警察告发他并间接导致死亡埋下了伏笔。）他去前妻的住处，但遭到前妻及其家人的谩骂和驱赶，甚至与前妻的哥哥打成一团，最后落魄的离开。他在别人眼中是一个自私，冷漠，无能，颓废的废人，所以他也只能与同样的废人为舞。阿加东为了能少点人分面条吃从而用计谋将朋友们气走的行为让我们看到了底层人在生存面前展现的劣根性。

直到他遇见了一位单纯，善良又贫穷的干着体力活的年轻姑娘，他的人生才开始有了变化。他们发生关系后阿加东故伎重演让姑娘去卖淫，单纯的姑娘很爽快的答应了。可在嫖客的车上单纯的她最终拒绝了嫖客的需求被赶下车。阿加东在焦急的苦等过程中突然发现了自己对姑娘的爱，他是真的爱上了这个善良的姑娘，因此才会在路边如此煎熬的等待。他终于开始找工作，不在再做皮条客，试图靠自己的力量养活心爱的女人。可当了一天的搬运工就让他累得受不了。最讽刺的是结束工作后回家的路上，曾经那些无所事事的混混朋友们开始嘲笑他的工作，嘲笑他居然替别人工作。帕索里尼对人性的审视充满力度。他躺在床上在对自己的怀疑和反思中做了一个自己死去躺在棺材里送入墓地的梦。而身边的混混朋友们也都死在了梦里（想起了《野草莓》）他梦见了自己的死亡，在看看自己现实的人生，这个死亡的梦是对他生命最大的鼓励。第二天他与两个朋友拉着车干活时，因为参与同伴的盗窃行为被一直监视他的警察发现，逃跑中被开枪打死。他因为爱改变自己，也因为爱失去生命。这是对过往人生的惩罚，也是对底层生命无奈的叹息。宿命般的结局和之后的《罗马妈妈》如出一辙。

帕索里尼的处女作充满了原始的自然主义，野蛮，专横，粗暴，狠毒，破败的房屋和街道，非职业演员原生态的咆哮，无望的生存环境下滋生的懒惰和卑劣，蛆虫般潮湿的房屋，残酷无比。

可以去死的人 也可以想怎么就怎么的人
比现实主义更现实 更冷酷
因为没有什么观点
但是你看到了无奈
那是一种尊重现实的态度
比一般导演看的深
是因为自己想的深
而且任何的爱与恨也是如此的深
以至于他是共产主义
他是变态狂

阿加东这样矛盾、极端又丰富的人物，好久没看到了。

一方面，他是个给妓女拉皮条，为食物欺骗朋友，偷自己儿子的项链，鄙视工作，整日高呼“打倒奴隶制”的无产者；另一方面，他愿意为了真爱去工作，压抑他的本性，也在朋友入狱后，坚持照顾朋友妻孩。他的矛盾是这个社会的矛盾，如果累死累活工作一天，还没有游手好闲，偶尔拉皮条挣得多，那为何要干正经工作？不如当个寄生虫，吸取妓女的血吧，这是阿加东的自大和偏执，他愤愤叫嚷着“让我去给别人卖血汗？只有畜生才工作！”，他嘲笑那些工作的人，以此获得心理优越感，好像成为了斗士，显得自己更高贵，其实不过是为了掩藏懦弱无能的自我麻痹。

有意思的是，后来他终于去工作了，他变成了以前的阿加东所不耻的工作者，反过来跟以前的狐朋狗友对骂。最后他躺在床上，陷入噩梦，梦里“无产者”阿加东死了，只剩下维多奇，一个普通的为生计奔波的工人。他对工作的恐惧暴露无遗，因为一旦工作，他就意识到自己没有任何的优势，他只能做一个乞丐，做一个没有自尊的无耻之徒。当这个社会让人失去羞耻，那将是个什么样的社会啊。 回过来看那个趴在床上一脸坚决地说出“要么世界将我毁灭，要么我将毁灭世界”的阿加东是多么天真又自我啊，他和这个世界，早就被毁灭了。

...God’s angle tooke me up, and he of hell

shouted, “o thou of heaven, why doest thou rob me?”

Thou bearest away the eternal part of him,

“for one poor little tear, that takes him from me...”

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……上帝的天使将我升起，然后那个地狱的人

叫喊，“属于天堂的，为什么抢夺我？”

你将他永恒的部分夺走，

“为了那滴将他从我身边带离的，可怜的泪水……”

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但丁 《炼狱》 第五章

甫一开始，便让我想起费里尼的<罗马，罗马>和贝托鲁齐的<死神>，但帕索里尼终归是自己来导，于是走得更深，他对底层人民描绘得栩栩如生。对于Accattone的个人命运，最后处理得有点戏剧化，但之前的那段梦境描述，在现实主义批判上又融入了一些心理剧的特点。

帕索里尼的处女作，和许多伟大导演的处女作一样，让人眼前一亮，你可以感受到<小武>对其的模仿(只是说我们更熟悉小武面临的环境)，而运用巴赫的曲子来烘托Accattone无力的反抗——很·有·趣！